Daily Flex Watering When 95%?

We’ve had a lot of rain the last couple days and today. I have a Daily Flex Schedule setup to run my 3 zones. I noticed that it is planning on running tomorrow morning, 2 of my 3 zones (backyard and trash side). Considering they were 110% moisture balance as of end of day yesterday and currently projected to be at 95% moisture balance at end of today, I wouldn’t expect the sprinklers to run tomorrow.

I know a few factors go into this, including allowed depletion. I have this set for both of those zones at 50%. I thought this means the system should not water unless it predicts that it will fall under 50% based on next available watering time + predicted weather up until then. My schedule does not allow for watering on Friday and Saturday, so would I be correct in assuming that the system believes if it does not water tomorrow (Thursday), it will be under 50% by Sunday? I guess I could believe that since the weather over the next 3 days is supposed to be around 75-85 degrees with only 20% chance of precipitation.

My only hangup there is that I don’t want it to oversaturate the lawn in an attempt to compensate for the possibility of falling below allowed depletion. Is there a setting somewhere to max out moisture balance?

Here are some photos showing the settings I mentioned above.

And one more question, is there a way to make the time each zone runs flex based on necessity?

Yes, you can either mark a zone as “empty” or “full”. On the moisture level screen, select Adjust, and you can set it from there. (I was in a similar situation. I’m only watering my drip zones right now, and I had to manually go in and mark them as full to make sure it did not water tomorrow. My rain sensor still has not dried out, so I should be OK, but I wanted to make sure).

I think the problem you are experiencing has to do with how the field density is capped by Rachio when it goes over 100%. Last year it was set to 120% and during the year they lowered it to 110%. @franz recently said that they are going to be adjusting this again in V3. It’s got to be tricky to set, I’m sure - I’ve seen differences just by observation in my own yard. When I get 3 inches of rain all at one time in a big storm, most of it runs off. But when I get that 3 inches slowly over a couple of days (like my last rain), I don’t get nearly the runoff and my soil seems to stay much more saturated for a longer amount of time.

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@Linn I think you touched on a bigger issue in your post too- it’s difficult to know over what period of time precipitation is applied and what amount of that is actually able to soak in, and what just runs off. Would be a cool feature to adjust the precip based on the rate at which it fell, but that sounds like it would get tricky… Now I have a feature request :joy:

@mbaturin Did filling your zone fix the issue? I think what was going wrong was the schedule is unable to water Friday and Saturday, so it must’ve thought it wasn’t going to make it until the following Sunday.

Nope it still wound up watering. Even filling the zones it must have thought it wouldn’t make it. I realized though that the lawn guy comes at 9-10am and watering happens at 5am. So I’m going to change it to water any day.

Must’ve been a hot couple of days :fearful: Sometimes it’s helpful to click the > arrow into the future, and then click more detail. It will pull up all of the projected ET, precip, and show the upcoming waterings. It can help with nailing down exactly why it’s watering!

Regardless, that’s great that you’re able to add those days back in. The more days flex is allowed to water, the better it works.